'Locking up' forests results in super hot fires

Maurie Killeen, Stratford14 Mar 2017, noon

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: It is disturbing and unfair to the Heyfield community to see the letters from people with a leaning to green movement ideals advocating the locking up of native forests and all will be fine for the forests and their future.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

IT is disturbing and unfair to the Heyfield community to see the letters from people with a leaning to green movement ideals advocating the locking up of native forests and all will be fine for the forests and their future.

During the past 50 years since the introduction of 'locking up' native forests to National Parks and reserves, our forests have been ravaged regularly with extreme hot fires events.

It cannot be argued otherwise.

It is clear that the letter writers have a limited knowledge of what is needed to maintain and preserve our native forests.

They have been brainwashed over many years that protection of the forests lay in and the closing down of the resource, thinking this will be best long term outcome for our native forests in Victoria.

This theory has proved wrong.

Consistent forest management is essential to having a healthy and diverse forest environment.

It is wrong for these letter writers and the green movement to target a small and proud town such as Heyfield and its community to close down their major employment.

The green movement has failed to help our native forests over the years; the Greens have been the cause of much of the devastation by extreme hot fires to National Parks, Forest Reserves and surrounding native forests.

The Greens could have done more to promote cool burn fire prevention and targeted the excesses of woodchip export industry, but instead they targeted the sawmill industry and small towns such as Orbost, Cann River, Erica, Mansfield, and many more.

It is hoped the inner city and outer Melbourne voters and politicians alike can see the wrongs of targeting a vulnerable town such as Heyfield.

The comments of "logging is not sustainable any more" and "native forests have been over logged" are a contradiction to the Victorian government's own sustainability certification under the national endorsed Australian Forestry Standards, internationally recognised by the PEFC the world's forest certification scheme.

If the government keeps reducing the resource area, then one day, the available native forest as a resource will cease to exist, but the same native forest resource will still be there.

Melbourne once had native forest from Port Philip Bay to the surrounds of present day outer metro Melbourne, which now has houses on it.

If it was decided to stop building and remove houses to regrow native forests again, then the growth and supply of housing for Melbourne would be unsustainable as well.

However, we all know that metro Melbourne will continue to develop unsustainably by encroaching on land that was once native forest unabated.

Green organisations, politicians seeking to maintain city votes, and city dwellers, need to back off from targeting the Heyfield community.